Broadcasters’ Steady March Towards an All-IP Environment

OTTAWA—Video over IP has become the
preferred way of shipping broadcast video
for economic reasons. It is significantly less
expensive to convert and compress video
into files capable of being sent over semiprivate
or even public Internet channels
than it is to send raw uncompressed video
over dedicated fiber or satellite channels.
For instance, as a result of moving to video
over IP, Showtime is saving “70 percent on
bandwidth costs compared to what they
paid before,” said T-VIPS COO Janne Morstol
chief operating officer for T-VIPS, a
Norwegian provider of signal processing
technology.

Video over IP is also the most effective
way for broadcasters to populate the diversity
of screens in use today. These include
HDTVs, PCs, tablets and the ever-growing
number of smartphones running on Apple
iOS, Android and BlackBerry operating systems.

Granted, video over IP has yet to get a
solid footing within the internal production
infrastructure of TV stations and networks,
but as costs come down, this too is
likely to change.

Visionary Solutions video over IP technology, at right, was used for live-to-air broadcast for the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla.

PROGRESS AND POSSIBLITIES
Wes Simpson, president of Telecom
Product Consulting in Orange Conn. and
author of “Video Over IP” (Focal Press,
2008), is impressed by the technology’s
progress in displacing dedicated telephone/
satellite circuits for moving broadcast
video. “This trend is underway and
fairly well established,” he said.

Simpson (who also writes TV Technology’s
Video Networking column), is equally
impressed that streaming media platforms
are consolidating on a handful of major
platforms such as Apple’s HTTP Live
Streaming (HLS), Microsoft’s Silverlight,
Adobe Flash and the emerging Dynamic
Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH).
This move towards a few video over IP
platforms, and away from a stable of proprietary
formats, “is making it much easier
to be a video content producer,” Simpson
said. Such consolidation also makes this
role less expensive, because there are
fewer kinds of streams
that need to be provided.

That’s not all.
Thanks to enhancements
to video compression
techniques,
broadcasters are delivering
better quality
pictures via video
over IP to multiplatform
devices, according
to Thomas Lattie,
vice president of
product development
for Harmonic. While improving quality, the
bitrate reductions associated with these
enhancements “are reducing transport
and data costs.” On a per-viewer basis, this
cuts the price for reaching eyeballs.

Looking ahead, the transport advantages
offered by video over IP could provide
broadcasters with some viewer-grabbing
options. For instance, a broadcaster could
take every single camera angle of a goal
during a sports game, and offer them to
viewers online in real time. The viewer
could then select whichever camera angle
suits them best, or go from one view to another
as it suits them. This unprecedented
level of choice is what’s possible when
“video over IP transport takes away limits,”
said Petter Ole Jakobsen, CTO of Vizrt.

Add the ability of video over IP to fit
seamlessly into a broadcaster’s overall
IP-based infrastructure—and to interact
easily with the outside world—and one
can see why it could make sense for a
TV station/network to move to an all-IP
workflow. Such an approach would give
a broadcaster both “scalability and costeffectiveness,”
said Gal Garnier vice president
of Compression and Distribution
Systems for Evertz. An all-IP plant would
allow everything to work in this universe,
starting at the camera and moving into
production, editing, storage and multiplatform
distribution.

THE OBSTACLES OF GOING ALL-IP
Clearly, there is a lot to be said for video
over IP’s myriad possibilities. So what is
holding this revolution back?

The main factor is cost. “When you look
at the price of a broadcast baseband router
and compare it to a Cisco IP router, the
broadcast router is
pretty compelling
from a price standpoint,”
said Simpson.
Historically,
price has always
mattered to broadcasters,
but now it
matters more than
ever due to the recession’s
impact
on ad revenues;
competition from
non-broadcast
platforms for viewers,
and the relentless
growth of
viewing options.

The second
obstacle is legacy
infrastructure.
Broadcasters don’t
want to tear out a
broadcast-specific plant that still works.
And when it is time to buy a new video
router, broadcasters may be more comfortable
with buying a new version of what
they have now, rather than taking “the
leap to an IP-based infrastructure,” said
Eugene Keane CTO of Norwegian-based
Nevion, which announced a recent merger
with T-VIPS, in part to take advantage of
the industry’s move to video over IP.

Do these obstacles mean that video
over IP ascendancy may not be a sure
thing? Not at all. It’s just something that
will take time to occur. After all, the
broadcast industry’s move to a file-based
video workflow “took 15 years,” said Eric
DuFossé, vice president of marketing for
Grass Valley. “Moving forward, we can see
baseband video going IP,” he noted, even
if the process takes many years to come
to pass.